Here’s a short introduction to our 96B Quad Ethernet Mezzanine. For more information, see the documentation at docs.ethernet96.com and if you want to buy the product, go to the order page here.
Introducing 96B Quad Ethernet Mezzanine
Update 2019-06-10: This product is now available to purchase! Read the documentation here, and get it from the order page here.
Over the last few months I’ve been really busy working on a new product and I just want to take a step back today and share some of it. Let me start with what it is and then I’ll tell you about how and why I did it.
The product A 4-port Gigabit Ethernet mezzanine card designed for Avnet’s Ultra96 Zynq Ultrascale+ single board computer.
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Avnet Silica's industrial networking demo features Ethernet FMC
Avnet Silica was at Embedded World 2018 in Nuremburg, Germany last February demonstrating some cool industrial networking solutions such as TSN and FOSS GNU/Linux security concepts on Opsero’s Robust Ethernet FMC and the Zynq UltraScale+. Get a glimpse of the hardware at 0:54. If you saw the demo in person, I’d love to know what you thought of it.
IntelliProp Demos NVMe Host Accelerator on FPGA Drive
Early this year IntelliProp released a demo video of their NVMe Host Accelerator IP core running on the Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA Development board. As you can see in the video, they are using Opsero’s FPGA Drive product with the PCIe slot connector to interface the NVMe SSD to the FPGA board. They measured an impressive performance of around 2300MBps sequential write speed and 3200MBps sequential read speed.
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Quick look at the UltraZed-EG SoM
In this video I take a look at the features of the UltraZed-EG System-on-Module and the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. As is typical for Avnet products, it’s a great deal with a price tag of only $485 USD, when the device alone (XCZU3EG-1SFVA625E) would cost you $354 USD. This SoM can’t be used as an SBC (single board computer), it needs a carrier card such as the UltraZed PCIe Carrier Card; this board will cost you $499 USD and has most of the hardware you need to exploit the Zynq UltraScale+ device to its full potential: Gigabit Ethernet, Display Port, PCIe, USB3 and SATA among others.
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A quick look at the Kintex Ultrascale KCU105
I’ve got the Kintex Ultrascale Development Kit on my desk today so it’s a good time to take a look inside and see what’s special about this board. The Ultrascale (20nm) and Ultrascale+ (16nm) FPGAs are taking over from the Series-7 devices (28nm), and I’ve seen more and more customer interest in them in recent months. The Kintex Ultrascale is the little brother of the Ultrascale family, providing the “best price/performance/watt” and “an optimum blend of capability and cost-effectiveness” according to Xilinx.
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FPGA Drive now available to purchase
Orders can now be placed for the FPGA Drive products on the Opsero website. Both the PCIe and FMC versions allow you to connect an M.2 PCIe solid-state drive to an FPGA development board and both can be purchased at the same price of $249 USD (solid-state drive not included).
The PCIe version has an 8-lane PCIe edge connector for interfacing with the PCIe blade (aka. goldfingers) of an FPGA development board.
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M.2 NGFF Loopback Module
Update 2018-05-03: You can now buy a basic M.2 NGFF loopback module from Opsero
Half the fun of making cool stuff is sharing it with others. The photos I’m sharing in this post are of my new M.2 NGFF loopback module - it’s a M.2 form-factor module with a loopback on each of the 4 PCIe lanes, as well as some electronics to test other connections such as the 3.3V power supply and the 100MHz clock.
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At last! Affordable and fast, non-volatile storage for FPGAs
Let me introduce you to Opsero’s latest offering: FPGA Drive FMC, a new FPGA Mezzanine Card that allows you to connect an NVMe PCIe solid-state drive to your FPGA.
There’s got to be a better way. In the past, if you were developing an FPGA based product that needed a large amount of fast non-volatile storage, the best solution was to connect a SATA drive. Physical interfacing was pretty simple because all you needed was one gigabit transceiver.
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Breakout the Zynq Ultrascale+ GEMs with Ethernet FMC
Did you know that the Zynq Ultrascale+ has 4 built-in Gigabit Ethernet MACs (GEMs)? That makes it awesome for Ethernet applications which is why I’ve just developed and shared an example design for the Zynq Ultrascale+ ZCU102 Evaluation board, armed with an Ethernet FMC to break-out those handy GEMs. The ZCU102 board has two FMC connectors, both high-pin-count (HPC), so I’ve created one basic design with two sets of constraints to choose from, depending on which FMC connector you want to use.
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